{"id":52782,"date":"2025-12-05T06:12:12","date_gmt":"2025-12-05T06:12:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/52782\/"},"modified":"2025-12-05T06:12:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-05T06:12:12","slug":"affordable-ish-housing-in-pittsburgh-bad-take-hall-of-fame-edition-pittsburgh-city-paper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/52782\/","title":{"rendered":"Affordable-ish Housing in Pittsburgh: Bad Take Hall of Fame edition – Pittsburgh City Paper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everyone who puts a lot of writing out in public is bound to want a few of them back. Quite a few of my takes have aged as well as a chip-chopped ham sandwich that got bumped to the back of the fridge and forgotten.<\/p>\n

I was reminded of some of my greatest misses this week, when the Ferris wheel-anchored Esplanade mega-development on the North Shore finally broke ground<\/a>. Back in 2023, I put it in my \u201cDead Developments: 10 promising Pittsburgh building projects that never happened.\u201d <\/a>\u00a0In my defense, I ranked them from Dead-dead to Undead, and this one was the closest to reanimating and shambling around. (The developer emailed me with annoyance back then and said it was still on track; I guess he was right). In the same story, the Garden Theater finally found suitable tenants \u2014 defying my predictions \u2014 though one (Starbucks) did just close.<\/p>\n

It could be worse; I could be the guy who asserts that people who make $140,000<\/a> a year are actually poor, a contender for the Bad Take Hall of Fame. Or, I could have been a sportswriter, which practically requires taking indefensible positions all the time. They\u2019ve got thicker skin than stegosaurs, particularly in this town. When I compared Kenny Pickett-to-George Pickens as \u201cthe next Montana-to-Rice,\u201d I was trolling a Niners-loving relative, and not putting it in print for the world to see. Recently, I\u2019ve been poking fun at the \u201cFAAAHRR TOMLIN\u201d guys for their all-purpose solution to the Steelers\u2019 struggles \u2014 but maybe they were right after all.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve said plenty of strange things in this column, mostly in jest, but one error I make pretty regularly is being way too optimistic about certain neighborhoods. I really do want Homestead, Hazelwood, and Carrick (among others) to become thriving, healthy places where working-class Pittsburghers can get ahead. And I do honestly think these places have a lot going for them. But I\u2019m often way off on the timetable, as with the Esplanade.<\/p>\n

For sale: 1605-1609 Brighton Pl.,<\/a> Mexican War Streets, $500,000.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t see a lot of side-by-side triplexes like this for sale, and \u2026 wait, this one just dropped by $170,000 \u2014 what in the name of Zarley Zalapski is going on here? This column is definitely not aimed at prospective landlords, but you could comfortably house most of a hockey team here, so maybe do that instead. Also, we\u2019ve got purple walls in at least one unit.<\/p>\n

\"\"606 Middle St. Credit: Courtesy of Zillow<\/p>\n

For sale: 606 Middle St.,<\/a> Deutschtown, $294,000.<\/p>\n

That is a lot of historic (circa 1900) house for not a lot of money in a neighborhood that turned the corner quite a while ago. It\u2019s a duplex, even, and just dropped by $5K. So, what\u2019s the catch? The catch is, um, EVERYTHING ELSE. You wanted lower prices? Well, OK; elect fools \u2014> cause recession \u2014> everything is cheap now because everyone feels poor. So much winning!<\/p>\n

\"\"Schoolhouse Apartments, 500 Tripoli St. Credit: Courtesy of Zillow<\/p>\n

For rent: Schoolhouse Apartments, 500 Tripoli St.<\/a>, Deutschtown, $1,450\/month.<\/p>\n

I \u00a0know what you\u2019ve been thinking: there simply aren\u2019t enough places in Pittsburgh for rent with spiral staircases protruding from the wall. Well, fret no more; the Schoolhouse Apartments, one of the first school-to-housing conversions in town, has you covered. Most price points here are a bit higher, but nothing out of the ordinary for Pittsburgh in late 2025.<\/p>\n

\"\"1326 Woodland Ave. Credit: Courtesy of Zillow<\/p>\n

For sale 1326 Woodland Ave.,<\/a> Marshall-Shadeland, $190,000.<\/p>\n

OK, now I think I\u2019m being trolled. My most consistent take is that the weird mid-century mania for creaky aluminum awnings should be shot into the sun. So, here\u2019s a duplex that\u2019s mostly metal awning; what are we even doing here? Hey, if you\u2019d like every rainstorm to sound like a hundred chipmunks dancing the rhumba in cleats on your roof, go for it, I guess.<\/p>\n

\"\"Greenhill Apartments, 4221 Winterburn Ave. Credit: Courtesy of Zillow<\/p>\n

For rent: Greenhill Apartments, 4221 Winterburn Ave.,<\/a> Greenfield, $1,145-$1,265\/month.<\/p>\n

What was going on in the \u201870s? (Besides drugs, I mean.) This probably started out as a mansard roof, but now it looks like an unflattering haircut \u2014 Lord Farquaad from Shrek, maybe \u2014 which isn\u2019t really a thing that any apartment needs. (Stay tuned for my next column idea, \u201chouses that resemble one-joke cartoon characters.\u201d Since Pittsburgh largely stopped building housing in the \u201870s, the Greenhill Apartments are still technically on the newish side for us.<\/p>\n

\"\"5440 Fifth Ave. Credit: Courtesy of Zillow<\/p>\n

For rent: 5440 Fifth Ave.,<\/a> Shadyside, $1,250\/month.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re not building any more Shadysides, a.k.a. dense, pedestrian-scaled neighborhoods with a vast array of housing options, from Victorian mansions to kind of tired mid-century apartment buildings, at a surprising range of price points. There\u2019s lots of reasons for that, starting with single-use zoning and the ever-profitable prioritization of cars over people. But we built neighborhoods like this before, so we probably could again.<\/p>\n

RELATED\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Everyone who puts a lot of writing out in public is bound to want a few of them…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":52783,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[2313,21193,17954,29819,992,73,75,74,4887,14188,1081,994],"class_list":["post-52782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-affordable-housing","tag-affordability","tag-affordable","tag-affordable-ish-housing","tag-home-feature","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news","tag-pittsburgh-real-estate","tag-real-estate-listings","tag-real-estate","tag-section-feature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52782\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}